Bryce Courtenay

Never take advice from a donkey.

The imagination is always the best torturer.

It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.

Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.

Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.

Always listen to yourself... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention.

Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky.' He looked at me and continued. 'The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous.' His piercing blue eyes looked into mine.' Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched a whole heap of other responses a fourteen years old can't really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the Judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn't think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark.

Over all this lay Hoppie's dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. Winning was something you worked at intellectually, emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness which often let me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness which could later be used against me.

Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do.

Cleverness is a false presumption', Doc had explained, 'it is like being a natural skater, you are so busy doing tricks to impress that you do not see where the thin ice is and before you know, poof! You are in deep, ice-cold water frozen like a dead herring. Intelligence is a harder gift, for this you must work, you must practise it, challenge it and maybe towards the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow whereas intelligence is the substance.

The thing about fires most people don__ realise is the noise. It__ deafening so even if you shout, you can__ be heard three feet away. You can never quite get used to the fury of it, it__ like a mighty roar of anger that just keeps going. I suppose flame is beautiful, the way it leaps into the air like it__ free to do what it wants. Other elements are also free and I guess the sea can be pretty awesome, wind too, and lightning, but fire has a mind and a determination. You don__ see it as a blind raging thing, which I suppose it is, but something that attacks and thinks and changes tactics. It has a malevolence that uses surprise, dirty tricks, cunning. You get to think of it as someone, not something, and it__ someone you have to beat, but right from the start you don__ like your chances because it__ so big and unpredictable and can do so much harm.

He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers".

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.

You couldn't lose, you was playing Mozart

Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going.